georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

132 Confronting Imagesdefinition of art, and thus of ‘‘symbolic form’’—but let’s not say definition,let’s say rather end, wish for ends, a wish shared by Cassirerand Panofsky concerning the ends of the history of art. To require ofartistic forms themselves a kind of reciprocity congruent with theform of knowledge, this was to require of symbolic forms that theyrealize, in their essence, the movement from concept to image. If thiswish should become reality, the whole history of art of which Panofskydreamed would reach its promised land: to articulate in truth theconcept of art images—objective genitive and subjective genitivesenses henceforth fused, their mutual confusion justified.The ‘‘simple’’—but tricky,* as we saw—reason of the history of artculminates, then, in a fourth magical operation. It is the disegno of thesystem. It is the invented line, the traced line whereby an image canmake itself recognized under the very profile of a concept. Now thisoperation indeed exists, it is legible at the exact center of gravity ofKant’s text: it is the mysterious and sovereign operation, in a sensealready magical for Kant himself, of the Schematismus der reinen Verstandsbegriffe,the ‘‘schematism of the pure understanding.’’ Withoutthis magical operation, the concept of ‘‘symbolic form’’ would havebeen destined to stalemate; with it, by contrast, everything becamepossible—which is to say that the most heterogeneous orders of realitydiscovered in one another a common design or purpose† . . . underthe lofty scepter of the concept.Kant—in whose writing, even according to Heidegger, ‘‘as in [thatof] no other thinker, one has the immediate certainty that he doesnot cheat’’ 136 —Kant started with a seemingly intractable situation: fora given object to be subsumed under a concept, its representation mustbe homogeneous (gleichartig) with that of the concept; but Kant himselfadmits that the ‘‘pure concepts of the understanding, however, incomparison with empirical (indeed, in general sensible) intuitions, areentirely unhomogeneous, and can never be encountered in any intuition.’’137 So are the concepts of the understanding quite simply inapplicableto the objects of our experience? Perhaps. If the sensible isopposed to the intelligible, how can the intelligible subsume the sensible?*retorse; also ‘‘twisted’’; ‘‘crafty.’’†se découvraient un dessin ou un dessein commun.